Binding the Wounds, Pastor Niemoller's Words and Truth

 

 

 

Binding the Wounds

It is clear to me that those in the White House (for 42 more days) and some in the Halls of Congress and in Statehouses (Florida for example) for far longer, are doing great damage to our democratic republic.  This is what Vladimir Putin engineered by manipulating our vain President and lending him a hand where possible.  With 74 million Americans having voted for Trump and many more supporting him, how can this wounding of our democratic republic be repaired without damaging it?  Perhaps it can, but at what cost?  Will the surviving nation remain a democratic republic?  Or will it have to be a less democratic nation, but hopefully a benign one?  Playing by our existing rules got us Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, and worse in the governorships and legislatures of many States.  Change is necessary but It cannot be done overnight.  We faced a similar problem in 1865.

Abraham Lincoln concluded his Second Inaugural address with a sentence starting thusly: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds … “

Good Advice.  But it takes two to tango which didn't happen back then.

 

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Words to Remember

Most of us are familiar with the words of the late Pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned for seven years in concentration camps by the Nazis.  After the Second World War, he pointed out that,

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

We cannot just stand by when Florida’s governmentstarts down this path. Please read on:

Gimme those computers or I'll shoot!

On Monday morning, about ten armed law enforcement officers raided the home of former Florida state data scientist Rebekah Jones and seized her computers, phone, thumb drives, and hard drives. Jones had been fired from her job at the state Department of Health for insubordination back in May when she apparently refused to manipulate data about coronavirus to downplay state infections at a time when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was eager to reopen the state. Jones had built the state’s Covid-19 dashboard, and after she was fired, she continued to compile and post coronavirus updates on her own.

An investigator with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement filed an affidavit saying that someone had hacked the state emergency management system to send a text to about 1,750 people with the message: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.” The affidavit said the text came from an IP address connected to Jones’s house, and the affidavit was the reason for the search warrant that led to the raid. Jones denies having anything to do with the text and noted that it went out on the official channel about the time that five of the eight team leaders at the DOH were fired in what she described as a purge.

Jones publicly blamed DeSantis for the raid on her home. “This is what happens to people who speak truth to power,” she tweeted. DeSantis’s spokesperson told CNN, “the governor’s office had no involvement, no knowledge, no nothing, of this investigation.” (I doubt that, but regardless of who ordered the raid, how necessary were the presence of armed law enforcement personnel to seize Ms. Jones computer hardware?)

You and I know what Pastor Niemoller would have said about this.  We cannot just stand aside and let these things happen.  (I am glad to see that just a few days later, there is a significant reaction in support of Ms. Jones.)  Sooner or later, if we are not careful, this could happen to each of us.  Even those who write blogs like this.  No man is an island.  Recall the advice given almost 400 years ago by poet John Donne, “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

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Truth and a Couple of Universes

I read the Palm Beach Post every day along with my morning coffee.   Mostly It complements my own thoughts, particularly on its editorial and op/ed pages.  But occasionally I wonder if perhaps I might be living in an alternate universe, brainwashed by not only the Post, but by the New York Times’ and the Washington Post’s columnists, not to speak of CNN and MSNBC, who also inhabit that alternate universe along with me.  

What if those millions who voted for Donald Trump and continue to support him are living in the real universe, and are not the gullible and often ignorant folks I believe them to be? Are we who call that other universe’s absurd explanations “conspiracies” the ones who are wrong? Am I the one living in an alternate universe and are the facts which I accept actually alt-facts?  Is truth a relative thing? These are matters better left to epistemologists but we have put them in the hands of politicians, a bad move.  

(Epistemology is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, logic, and metaphysics.)

JL